


Small and Petty Gods

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Series: Perihelion [5]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, One Shot Collection, POV Frank Castle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-23 16:28:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17686976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: Karen Page is looking at him from a chair at his bedside, expression saying more than he can read right now.He feels the light pressure of her hand on his arm.He can feel the cold press and yawn of the hole he's sinking into, opening wide and swallowing him whole.





	1. small and petty gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edourado](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edourado/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He reads Karen’s articles in the grey of the morning, when the sky's just starting to crack open and the spaces between words are easier than the minutes of the clock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time period starts with Punisher S1 but will mainly rewrite S2 when I have the energy to engage with that cluster fuck. They are typically the same timeline. Frank POV, depressing as fuck but I love this man and I do want him to be happy, honest.
> 
> It's more an exploration of moments with a couple of story beginnings I never ended up continuing, like this first one. Writing frank is both cathartic and exhausting for me haha.

He reads Karen’s articles in the grey of the morning, when the sky's just starting to crack open and the spaces between words are easier than the minutes of the clock. He doesn’t read all of them - hell, he doesn’t even read them in the right order, and sometimes he wonders why he does it, why he keeps them, why he lets the papers stack up in the corner. Take a step, make a decision - it’s the kind of certainty he’d sworn by, once. If you’re gonna do it, you do it.  
  
He does, and he doesn’t. Shit stacks up. He gets a box, eventually.  
  
Curt’s a good man. Their evenings, their chats, they become routine, and books start appearing in the spaces in his apartment: Moby Dick on the chair, Fitzgerald in the corner; Woolf by the bed, right by the papers.  
  
_“I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead and yet am now alive.”_  
  
Falling, sinking, the sea, where the sand presses back against the soles of your feet and there's noise and there's water and you’re thinking, you must be dreaming to find water in a desert like this - but it's not, you're home, and it's your kids around you, and your hands are empty, curling around thin air. It feels like a dream, the way time passes and it doesn't. Reality so thin you can slip through it like a knife.  
  
There are words and there are mornings, of sorts. There are whales in the plaster and the dead speak to him through the walls, tracing their fingers over the curve of his ear.  
  
“What’d you think?” Curt asks when Frank hands back the latest, a memoir from a self-professed sex addict. “Crock of shit right?”  
  
He fixes him with a long, hard look, one that only makes Curt’s grin wider. “Yeah,” he says, “crock of shit’s the tip of the iceberg,” and Curt starts laughing and then he’s laughing too, the sound bubbling up, like the throes of a drowning man. “What the fuck are you getting me to read, Curt?”

Curt claps him on the shoulder, firm, familiar. “Makes you think of Billy, right?”  
  
He shakes his head, smiling like an asshole. “Shut up. I swear, the best part of it was when he almost got stabbed.”  
  
When the chairs are all folded up and the room is locked behind them they linger in the hall, two cups of cold coffee between them. Curt takes a good look at him then, long and close and then he sighs, leaning back against the wall.  
  
“You see, Frank,” he says. “All of this, shitty literature, everything - that’s just the crux of it. ‘Normal life’, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It can be all shit and nonsense, as well as everything else and that, that’s one of the hardest things to get used to again. To learn how to do again. There are new rules. Different perspectives. But you do, Frank; you do adjust.”  
  
Frank rounds the cup in his hands, looking down at it, tapping his index finger against the rim. There’s that, that heaviness in his chest, the feeling that's never really gone, that never really goes away. “I don’t have a ‘normal life’ anymore, Curt,” he says, carefully. He had one before. He lost them. They’re not coming back.  
  
“Yeah, I know,” Curt says, just as quietly. “But you still have a life.”

Frank looks at him a moment, and then glances away. “Yeah,” he says, and drains the coffee and Curt gives him a look, one that tells him he knows what he's thinking, that he's not falling for his bullshit. They leave it at that for now.


	2. in-between

Day in and Maria’s fingers walk the familiar path down behind his ear.

Day in and there’s sand in his mouth and gritted into the sheets and his eyes are stinging, stinging in the desert heat. There’s a hand between his shoulder blades, where his pack should be. There are fingers smoothing up, curling, dragging in the hair of his nape, and her voice in his ear - _wake up, sleepy head-_

 

-

 

He kicks away the blankets and bends back the cover of the Fitzgerald so far he hears the spine crack.


	3. Carousel

“I got you, I got you.”

It’s like a dream. He sits there on the edge of the carousel and the lights are still going, the horses; Madani’s bleeding out in his hands, and he’s still here.

He’s still here.

He presses his hand against the entry wound. He checks, automatically: no exit wound registers somewhere, as if he’s saying it to someone else, as if it’s far away. He doesn’t see the kids until they’ve levered themselves down beside him. He sees the girl’s hair against his arm, so different from his baby girl’s; sees blood welling between the splits of her fingers and then he’s somewhere else again, he’s nowhere, and it’s quiet, beneath the click of the motor.

There are sounds in the distance, getting louder. Sirens, lights; they’re coming for them, coming for both of them, him and Bill, and that’s alright, he thinks. That’s alright.

When they come, he goes easy.

He only really feels it when they pry Madani from him, hand by bloodied hand.


	4. Marcid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: I love you more than you love yourself - Austra

“I killed three women.”

It's one of the first things out of his mouth after he wakes strapped to a hospital bed. He stretches against the burn of his stitches and the cuffs and it's all too familiar, all the way down to the way Karen Page in a chair at his bedside. Her eyes hold his, expression saying more than he can read right now. He feels the light pressure of her hand on his arm. He can feel the cold press and yawn of the hole he's sinking into.

“I did that, Karen," he says, and then his throat sticks. He speaks anyway. “I- I murdered three women. Shredded through them like they were, like meat, yeah? I went in there and tore that place apart and when I went up there and I found them-”

Red bleeding into red and into red; on his hands, in his eyes, in his mouth. He'd caught one of them in the stomach, above the waist of her skirt - her blouse had soaked to her skin, scoring the straight edge of the hemline. Another, in the back - three shots, a ragged constellation - and he feels a lurch of nausea and he jerks forward and meets the cuffs. Karen is still there.

Karen is still there.

He can't look at her, so he doesn't. And the thing is, these last couple of months, he's had some time to think about what this thing of theirs is. He's had time, and he's thought about what it is that he does and is capable of doing and there are things she could forgive or at least understand, he knows that- but this-?

“Frank.” Her voice is steady, and there's a trust there that he definitely doesn't deserve. “You didn't know. You didn't know, Frank - you still don't know-”

He grimaces and laughs, feeling the pain of it in his torn up throat.

“No, Kare, that's not- The thing is, I went in there and I didn't care, yeah?”

He takes another breath, and then he makes himself look at her.

“I didn't - care who was there, Karen; the way I was, I woulda, I would've killed anyone that got in my way."

He sees her recognise that.

She's got one hand on the railing beside the cuff, close enough to brush her fingertips against the back of his hand, and the other, she's curled against her collarbone.

She's still looking at him.

 “I did that." The words burn on the way out. "I was that. And now I, I uh-”

Her hand fits into his and he starts at the touch, but he doesn't pull away. He closes his eyes and sees three bodies painted on the backs of his eyelids - crooked, still; cooling. He feels the joints of Karen's fingers as she twines them between his, and he can't tell her- he can tell her this much, what she needs to know, but he can't tell her about the looks on their faces; what they must have been thinking; what they must have felt when his bullets went through them. He'd stormed through there like a force of nature, like a rabid dog, and they- they were what, collateral, and he-

“I'm no different, Kare. All those- those shit bags I killed, I put down, yeah?” He licks his cracked lips. “I'm no different. So you, you should go, get away from this. Please. Please, just-”

“Frank.” There are tears in her eyes when he meets her gaze but she firms her mouth, forcing a smile. She doesn’t budge, and he expected that but there’s more coming than she knows- “I'm not going anywhere.”

He blows out a breath, frustration and something like fear stirring into a kind of life. “What did I just tell you- I killed them Karen, there's no going back from th-”

“It doesn't matter. To me. It doesn't matter.” She works a lopsided smile, and her hand in his tightens. “I don't scare that easy, Frank; you should know that by now.”

“It should matter.”

She pulls her lip between her teeth and shakes her head. “It doesn’t.”

He looks at her, hard. There’s a kind of throbbing in his head, behind his eyes, in tune with his heartbeat and she gives his hand a final squeeze before she releases it, settling back into the chair with the air of someone in for the long haul.

_I think you know why_ , her eyes seem to say, and something in him does, he thinks. He does.

“Karen,” he tries, anyway, and she turns her head and looks at him and the words fail.

“Think you should get some rest,” she says instead, folding into the chair. “We’ve got a long fight ahead of us.”

“Yeah,” he says, in lieu of anything else, and all of that, the exhaustion, the pain, the hazy lace of the painkillers they have him on, they seem to hit him at once, drawing him into silence. At first he doesn’t dream. And then there’s just the notion of periwinkle and silk, and the waxiness of leaves pressed between his fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDOURADO IS A BEAUTIFUL AND WONDERFUL PERSON WHO DESERVES A BETTER PROMPT FILL THAN THIS i will work on it but in the meantime *jazz hands*


End file.
